Our Shared Vision for Environmental Philanthropy Today
Stay Strong in the Face of Pressure
Grantmakers foster growth or impede it. Continued support of environmental work that protects people and planet in the face of pressure to retreat shows strength.
Fund like a Healthy Planet Requires a Healthy Democracy
Every issue requires the planet’s well-being. Environmental grantmakers must invest with awareness of the systems and political context that sustain both people and planet.
Environmental Philanthropy is Global, Even if You’re Working from Home
Protecting people and planet requires confronting fascism and authoritarianism, building power at the local level, and understanding our connection to global efforts.
Demonstrate Sharing Power is Possible
Philanthropy holds different kinds of power, including the power to act in solidarity and to share power with communities most impacted by the crises we face.
Philanthropy must develop generational plans to share power.
Fund Infrastructure to Sustain Change
Transformation requires steady and sustained infrastructure. Strengthening infrastructure is often second to programmatic or campaign work. Philanthropy must fund the operations, administration, and reserves building needed to hold movements together by providing flexible funding.
Care for the People Who Do the Work, Not Just For the Work They Do
Sustaining effective environmental work for the long hauls requires not only strong organizations, but also a thriving workforce, succession planning, and thoughtful leadership transition processes. Caring for the people also acknowledges disproportionate burdens based on leaders’ gender and race.
Live the Role of Risk-Taker
Philanthropy’s job is not to preserve its existence but to move money and power toward experimentation, learning, and collective action even. This demands recognizing the risk of inaction is bigger than the risk of failure.
Do More, Together
No successful grantmaker acts alone. Partnership with communities, movements and across sectors is both a smart strategy and a responsibility. Philanthropy’s best work depends on collaboration that replaces competition with shared purpose.
Our Shared Vision for the Future of Environmental Philanthropy
Belong Fully to the Movement
Philanthropy’s strength lies in its willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with people taking risks and making change. Grantmakers participate in movements by leaning in and quickly adapting to movement strategy rather than observing from afar.
Practice Accountability
Philanthropy operates as a community to support the planetary project of surviving. A thriving community creates and reinforces accountability to sustain relationships through transparency, shared learning, and mutual responsibility among peers and partners.
Operate Across Borders and Boundaries
Communities everywhere hold lessons about justice, joy, and innovation. At its best, philanthropy invests in the local experience as part of a global system, connecting efforts across movements, geographies, contexts, and disciplines. Collaboration across boundaries— cultural, sectoral, and political—is not optional; it is how relevance and impact are sustained.
Act in Real Time
The world is changing faster than philanthropy is. Grantmakers must think about and plan portfolios generationally, questioning their structures, missions, and practices with the understanding that new systems and structures must be built.
Stand Firm for Dignity
Philanthropy stands firm to resist regression and reject neutrality in moments of moral crises. Steadfast conviction means refusing to settle for incremental change when lives and ecosystems are at stake, and protecting the reputation of our grantee partners.
Appropriately Assess Risk
Philanthropy’s greatest risk lies in prioritizing preservation over transformation. Philanthropy recognizes that losing money is less costly than losing people and progress. Change requires grantmakers to take bold positions and act even when the path forward is uncertain.
Fund for Generational Change
Philanthropy chooses to avoid competition by funding systematically. Grantmakers move money to broaden and reinforce success with more capital for more experiments, operations, and infrastructure.
Our Internal Work
Honor What’s Ending to Make Space for What’s Next
Change begins with change. Grantmakers must grieve the loss of previous ways of working to allow new generations to shape the future in their own context and language. Letting go isn’t failure; it’s stewardship of evolution and renewal.
Recall That Numbers Represent Lives
Impact should not only be measured through data points or carbon units. Behind every metric are people, ecosystems, and futures. Measurement is meaningful when it is rooted in relationships and reflects harmony between action and impact.
Give Freely
Giving is rooted in the belief that what we release will take root elsewhere. To give is to trust—in people, in purpose, and in possibility. Philanthropy should move resources in alignment with their missions, seeing spend-down and redistribution not as loss, but as acts of flow and repair.
Move More Money
Philanthropy has the unique capacity to both attract and mobilize resources at scale. Its role is not only to give but to draw in additional capital, relationships, and imagination to expand what’s possible. To multiply its impact, philanthropy must use its influence to unlock new flows of funding and align others toward shared outcomes.
Calling In Our People in Environmental Philanthropy
Trustees: Lead with Duty and Equity
Trustees owe a duty of care to the organizations they serve. Stewardship includes not only managing financial health but also knowing and sharing the enduring value of race equity as central to philanthropy’s economic, innovative, and social purpose.
Executive Leaders: Drive Change and Stay Accountable
Executive leaders must relentlessly move trustees and their organizations toward bold, systemic change. Leadership means holding oneself accountable to the communities most affected by their decisions and measuring success by the progress of those they serve.
Program Officers: Bridge the Past and the Possible
Those who work between program investment and divestment decisions hold the power to connect inherited wealth with future solutions. Their charge is to resource transformation, especially when it requires dismantling “business as usual” and resourcing systems for shared prosperity.
Decision Makers: Get Close to the Work
Authority carries the responsibility to stay proximate to the problems philanthropy seeks to solve. When barriers or inequities appear, the work is clear—see them, name them, act on them.
Advisors: Trade in the Truth
An advisor’s stock-in-trade is influence. Even without formal authority, advisors have the duty to challenge norms, raise hard truths, and take the risk to make creative paths for change.
Grantmakers: Collaborate Because the Work Depends on It
Grantmaking is an act of co-creation. Grantmakers are catalysts in a shared project for change. Progress in philanthropy depends on working together, aligning resources, and amplifying collective impact.
Legal Counsel: Enable the Future
Legal counsel plays a pivotal role in shaping how philanthropy assesses risk. Grantmakers have a responsibility to check to see if their counsel holds their values. Legal counsel should affirm and safeguard institutions and advance grantmaker’s ability to act boldly, ethically, and in alignment with the public good. Counsel must help foundations interpret regulations in ways that expand access, equity, and impact, guiding boards and executives toward practices that honor both compliance and conscience. Supporting the best future practices in philanthropy means advising not only on what is permitted, but also on what is possible.
Investment Managers: Consider Mission Alignment First
Investment managers oversee considerable assets on behalf of grantmakers, often prioritizing returns over mission. Investment managers and those in philanthropy who work most closely with them should ensure that investment portfolios are not only aligned, but proactively advancing the philanthropic mission. The foundation or fund intentionally hires consultants, advisors and leadership with a clear and demonstrated commitment to our values.